Today, UE are equipped with various hardware and software that enables users of the UEs to access various services such as multimedia services, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) services and the Internet services from their UEs. For example, the users may use a UE to access 3GPP services. The UEs may be separate mobile communication devices or embedded in the household devices. Examples of the UEs include but are not limited to, Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) televisions, LED televisions, Digital Cameras (DC), Personal Computer (PC), mobile communication devices and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA). The UEs are associated with appropriate client software, radio protocols, a separate module containing radio protocols and other elements that enables the UEs to access 3GPP services.
For accessing 3GPP service, the user of the UE can subscribe with the 3GPP network and thereafter the 3GPP network provides with necessary information like subscription identity, master key for further key generation, and module to derive unique keys to access 3GPP services. Hence, the UE for example a LCD television with necessary subscription information can initially register itself with the 3GPP network and can thereafter use the 3GPP network to watch High Definition (HD) video which is provided by the 3GPP services.
However, the use of the 3GPP services in such UEs are very minimal and not very often. For example, a user of the LCD television may want to view only a few football matches in HD using the 3GPP services. Thus, for watching few matches in HD, the users have to unnecessarily register and subscribe the UEs with network and then use the services. Further, there may be a case where the user may also have a mobile communication device that is already subscribed with the 3GPP network. Hence, the user has to subscribe and register each UE separately with the 3GPP network to access the 3GPP services on the 3GPP enabled devices.
Generally, the UEs are subscribed to handle security issues in accessing the 3GPP services but this leads to unnecessary subscriptions information storage and huge amount of money wasted as each subscription is associated with specific amount of money and hardware modules. Currently, there is no mechanism available to share single subscription between different UEs to obtain 3GPP access so as to reduce the additional cost associated with the 3GPP access and reduce the usage of communication resources.